Towards grief justice: Making meaning ‘when grief comes to class’


Jennifer Poole, Toronto Metropolitan University

We are living in grief-saturated times (Perreault et al, 2010), intensified by pandemics, conflict, disaster and the weaponization of white, capitalist and human supremacies. Those who do not serve these supremacies are disenfranchised, as is any grief for their loss. In this so-called country of Canada, we are not supposed to grieve that which does not perpetuate colonialism and its related projects of domination, but we do, and we carry that grief with us wherever we go. This kind of disenfranchised grief (Doka, 1999), produced in part by what we have previously named as grief supremacy (Poole & Galvan, 2021), predominates in so-called higher education, where grief is often ignored, refused or disciplined. In 2022, we began an inquiry into these practices called, ‘When grief comes to class’, inviting learners, staff and educators at Toronto Metropolitan University to story the grief they carried on campus. Grounded in a decolonizing approach to re-Search (Absolon, 2022), we created spaces for grief story sharing and then, instead of coding, invited story tellers to highlight messages they wanted us to share more widely. Those messages are both practical and pressing, the stuff of policy, research and curriculum change. Those messages also shaped what we are calling grief justice. In this session, we share our theorizing so far, outlining the meaning making that brought us to grief justice. We share how we are connecting it to disability justice. We detail how it is both a call for a conversation about grief in all forms of justice work as well as a call for justice in grief work. Indeed, much of grief ‘education’ and literacy is often apolitical, another white space (Anderson, 2015) saturated with various forms of grief supremacy. By sharing our understanding so far, we invite a collective and just reimagining of grief practice, policy and education and a grief activism that makes space for it all.

This paper will be presented at the following session: